By Adaora Ezike, MHS Candidate, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:

Approaching 2015, the global community awaits the results which will reveal whether priority countries achieved their Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. Global health monitoring bodies such as the World Health Organization, advocate for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as the primary focus of post-2015 sustainable development goals (UNESCO 2012). The Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) would create a template for a legally binding global health treaty rooted in the right to health.

Although costly to rollout, the framework convention would be advantageous for advancing and achieving health justice; it could do this by countering intellectual property laws that reduce access to essential medicines, reforming environmental health policies that currently protect the drivers of environmental pollution and by increasing financial transparency of health sector budgets.

Universal health coverage would also be beneficial in leveraging public health efforts to improve availability, accessibility and acceptability of health services and interventions on the population-level. Furthermore, establishing a legal obligation for the government to provide a standard quality of care and coverage could increase overall health efficacy of communities and health seeking behaviors of individuals.READ FULL BLOG